Ars sits down with Chris Carroll and Mark Julio, the men who helped to bring …

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The problem with releasing an arcade-quality stick for $150 is that you don't want to be sitting on inventory... but the demand is also going to be high, with one of the biggest fighting game releases of the year coinciding with your launch. Mad Catz is struggling with making more Arcade Fightstick: Tournament Edition sticks, but the company claims things are getting better. We caught up with Chris Carroll, the Senior Product Development Manager and Mark Julio, the Product Manager, to talk about the shortages and the thought that went into designing the sticks.

"The first run was around 3,000 units per platform and there has been some misconception that this is all that we would make," Carroll explained when asked about the shortages. "We continued with production and while I don’t know the exact the number, as of the time you are reading this we should be shipping at least the second run." Julio assured me that everyone who preordered will get a stick, although it may take some time.

Carroll seemed to bristle when I asked if this early shortage will only lead to buzz about the product and more potential sales. "No. Let me be perfectly clear that we believe the buzz is from the fact this is a great product that truly represents the best in class money can buy. We are in no way purposely holding back stock to ramp up demand. That would be crazy!" he told Ars. "We are simply overwhelmed with demand, and trust me, if we had more sticks we’d be happy to sell ‘em."

Of mods and men

It's clear the team put much thought and debate into how to set up the stick: how many buttons to put on the face, what kind of stick to use, and how to lay the buttons out. We messed with the design in a few ways when modding our own stick, so we asked if they're mad that Ars wrecked their baby. "That was the first crossroads we came to during development. There were discussions early on both internally at Mad Catz and with Capcom’s team debating which style joystick and buttons to use. We played with the idea to go more retro and follow the traditional American Street Fighter 2 straight 6-button layout with a bat top, but in the end went with the Vewlix-inspired layout and components. In the end I believe we made the right choice but I do understand that there is a large group that prefers, and will most likely switch to use, a bat top," Carroll told us, somewhat diplomatically.

Julio also told us that the stick was designed for players to easily swap the top of the joystick, and that he appreciates the fact that players may have a strong preference. You can also change your button layout in order to mimic American arcade cabinets. "If you really want the 'American Style' feel out of the FightSticks, you could even use the right six buttons instead of the left six, giving you a straight across layout."

Counter-intuitively, the design for the FightPads proved tricky. "I would say the development of the 6 button FightPads was more difficult than the FightSticks in that the D-Pad and action buttons had to be developed from the ground up.

While the Tournament Edition sticks come with Sanwa parts, the $80 models do not. We asked Carroll where those parts came from. "In regards to the standard edition Arcade FightStick, it is indeed true that the components are not genuine Sanwa parts—that’s obvious in the price difference—but we still believe you’re getting a fantastic piece of kit that we believe is better than anything else at a comparable price," he said. "The components used are not famous, but still of great quality and come from our own sources in the Far East.??"

It has also been reported that the FightSticks are having problems, with many reports across the Internet pointing at forum threads of people having issues with the joystick. Mad Catz responded officially by saying that "this issue does not happen on each Arcade FightStick and has been reported on a small number of units. The issue is due to a metal washer shifting out of place and is easily rectified. The issue and the resulting fix have been extensively documented on several forums."

You can also send your stick in for the quick fix, although that doesn't sound so hot when you have just purchased an $80 piece of equipment. Details on the defect, including fixes, can be found on the wonderfully thorough Shoryuken forum.

Other challenges

The real challenge? Counter-intuitively, the design for the FightPads proved tricky. "I would say the development of the 6 button FightPads was more difficult than the FightSticks in that the D-Pad and action buttons had to be developed from the ground up. In other words, you can’t go buy Sanwa D-Pads or buttons as there is no 'standard.' Much time was spent testing different materials and tensions before we came up with the final product," Carroll explained.

"It definitely was tough deciding on which direction we were going with the FightPad," Julio said, agreeing. "If you saw some older images online you might have seen that we were going back and forth between a Neo Geo Pocket-styled D-pad, and eventually went with the more traditional floating D-pad."

The result is an impressive six-button pad that does very well on both Street Fighter and the standard arcade-style games of the Xbox and PlayStation 3. When asked if there was anything that had to be removed from the $150 model for pricing reasons, Carroll is adamant: this is the stick they wanted to create, with no corners cut. "From a design standpoint I couldn’t be happier. Our Industrial Designer Lawrence Yeung has created the sexiest arcade stick ever seen and our Art Director Roentgen Reyes finished the job with amazing packaging. There weren’t any compromises and we spared no expense with the TE."